8:50:41splittistCan it really be that the state of the art in academic paper production is a Rube Goldberg tex stack?
8:52:30no-defun-allowedProbably not. Do people still use Pascal compilers today or do they just translate TeX to C before building it?
8:56:09beachI am afraid that TeX/LaTeX is the best there is, and it is really bad.
8:57:35no-defun-allowedI feel the same way about SQL in databases, I'm not sure why it's the industry standard for databases honestly. The introspection there is very limited, you can't portably request a list of all the tables, for example.
9:11:44shka__no-defun-allowed: that's actually very simple to answer
9:12:17shka__as for TeX, no idea what the heck happend
17:48:17jcowanSQL was deliberately designed to be the intersection of the intentions of the implementors, which is why older versions have an incredible number of stoopid restrictions.
17:49:05jcowan(By the same token, early Fortran only allowed three kinds of array indices: a plain variable, a variable plus a constant, or a variable minus a constant, so that the action could often be compiled as a single machine instruction.)
17:51:04jcowanAs for TeX, it is what it is. And yes, the dialect of Pascal Knuth used is translated to C using a special-purpose translator. Nowadays it could probably be compiled by Free Pascal, though.